SGJ Podcast #11: Star Trek Games (or Warp Factor WTF)

Helllooooooooooo everyone, and welcome to episode number eleven of the Space Game Junkie Podcast. This week, Jim and I bring on long-time friend, former video games journalist and fellow Star Trek afficianado, Denny Atkin, to talk about the highs and lows of Star Trek gaming. With the recent movie-based game hitting virtual shelves, I thought it’d be fun to have a look back at what is likely the most inconsistent franchise in all of gaming. ;)

We hope you enjoy what is, so far, our longest podcast. :) As always, we invite your thoughts in the comments or on the forum, and we ask that you subscribe to us via RSS or iTunes. :) Thanks for listening!

7 Responses

Ahhh startrek online…
I’ve “beaten” it.. twice.. once federation, ones klingon.
It’s not bad, the gameplay isn’t terrible in space, and in some places quite fun… ground combat… I just wish it would go away some times -.-
Mid to late game though I loved the story, and the end game group space missions were a blast.

Thank you guys for such extensive dive into Star Trek gaming.
I have played ST: Judgment Rites and 25th Aniversary before I’ve seen anything of Star Trek on TV (I have read some novels though). I thought these games were brilliant! Then I finally have watched whole TOS, a couple of years ago, And I think these games are brilliant… squared! Shame there was no such games after :(
BTW, still on 5th season of TNG now. Is it worth checking TNG: A Final Unity? You mentioned it was bad, or was it another TNG game?

I’m going back and listening to the old podcasts, so I’m going to mention the parts where I literally shouted at Downcast:

How could you not mention Netrek… the first freakin Internet Game! A lot of the protocols for online gaming foundationally are based on that very game. Also, it’s ridiculously fun. I can’t even think of an analog in 2014.

Also, Final Unity is a very underrated game. The Combat isn’t great, but I remember it being very similar to Judgement Rites, and it had a very nice episodic feel. That is the only game in my mind that actually simulated the episodes as much as possible (and not just combat simulators). Also, on the highest difficulty, you had to assemble the away team yourself, which I know you were talking about. Worf/Data/Riker was always nice. They also had some redshirts.

Now to do a data dump on some other things:

ConQuest (see what they did with the Q!) was a product of the let’s make everything Magic phase of game history. There was also an WWF-style Magic game that was actually pretty fun around this time as well. One of the dumbest things that Decipher did was never have an online interface for their CCGs, which were actually pretty fun. (They could’ve cleaned up, and Decipher did a LOT of dumb things in their day, so this is saying something).

You know what was super popular, believe it or not? The Star Trek After Dark screensaver? That sounds super dumb in modern day, but screensavers in the 90s were a BIG DEAL. Like, you bought screensaver packages. You paid real money for something to go on your monitor when you weren’t using it. The TOS ones just had great sound. Loved loved loved the sound. I have to try to get those to run again.

Speaking of online games… some of the best “Star Trek” ish experiences were the text-based games like the Kobryiashi, but also the online MUDs, many of which are still around to this very day.

That’s all I got. I continue to believe that there are people like me around who would still pay for these, so it surprises me that there hasn’t been an effort to get them on something like GOG. I suppose that the GOG pie is too small to be cut into enough pieces that everyone would get a taste, but that’s a shame. It’s also a shame that the TNG ends with the Legacy game and the Nemesis movie.

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